Gender Wars

So I was reading through a thoroughly enjoyable Attack of the Correiakin on Brad Torgersen’s Facebook page where he was destroying a troll over the whole Republican/conservative “war on women” hashtag twitter battle thing. One of the things the troll kept bringing up was the whole gender-gap pay-gap meme.

I’m not going to look for links, do your own damn homework, but that has been pretty much proven to be bunkum. It has to do with leave of absence due to child rearing, which is something that most women choose to do, combined with the fact that mothers are going to be more likely to take days off for family things and the like. The problem with that is it leaves a huge gap in your resume with the resulting decrease in pay due to less time in service and smaller paychecks due to not being compensated for all the days that are taken off.

It strikes me as funny that this should be an ongoing issue when the matter has been so thoroughly explained, but it keeps coming up time and again as proof that old white men hate women or some such thing as that. What I find so funny is that this is what the womyn have been agitating for all along...equality. If a man has a gap in his resume he also is going to experience lesser pay because of it. If he takes time off for family things he is not going to be paid for all of those days.

Congratulations ladies, you have reached parity, you have attained your goal, you are now being treated exactly as your male counterparts would be treated given the same set of circumstances. This is what you have striven for, is it not? Hear you roar! Or is that...why are you crying? Isn’t this what you wanted?

No?

Welcome to the real world. Very often what we think we want and what we actually attain are two separate and sometimes diametrically opposed things.

In this particular case you are faced with a choice, as we all are. Either your kids are worth the sacrifice so you chose a decrease in pay later on in return for the rewards of watching them grow, or you accept what has traditionally been the male parents burden of missing out on everything while you try to make a living, only to wake up one day and realize this is the day you are to walk your daughter down the aisle; that she has grown up quite without your consent and you have missed the whole thing.

I completely agree with the notion that one parent should be a stay-at-home parent, studies have proven that kids who have a parent at home are going to do better in school which translates to doing better at life in general. Traditionally this role has been filled by the female parent, but more and more the roles are being reversed. Either way, one parent is going to watch the child grow and the other is going to miss quite a bit of it as they earn the family's daily bread. The bottom line is, nothing is free, all things have a price.

Take what you have paid for.